Subject: Re: [PATCH -next] staging/easycap: make module params private/static, fix build

From: "R.M. Thomas" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 12 Nov 2010 10:30:15 +0000

Randy Dunlap wrote:
> On 11/11/10 14:02, R.M. Thomas wrote:
>> Randy Dunlap wrote:
>>> The easycap driver has module parameters (bars, gain, & debug)
>>> with global scope that intrude on the kernel namespace and cause
>>> build problems.  Change the names of them to be driver-specific
>>> and make 2 of them static.
>> I did do test builds of the driver in-tree prior to submitting the
>> recent set of patches, but did not see any warnings so did not spot
>> this mistake.  There's presumably something wrong with the way I'm
>> building the kernel.
> 
> This build problem shows up when this driver is built into the kernel
> image, not built as a loadable module.  Did you only build as a loadable
> module, maybe?  and what CPU architecture did you build for?  That could
> also matter.

Yes, that's it.  I do development of the driver on a machine running
Debian stable with 2.6.26.  I detect compilation and house-style
errors by copying the source into a clone of the linux-next tree and
running make and checkpatch.pl, but obviously I don't install.  To
test the run-time behaviour of the driver I copy the driver source to a
separate (sacrificial) machine which is actually running linux-next and
build the driver there out-of-tree as a loadable module, complete with
the installation step.  One machine is x86-64, the other is x86.

I'll change my way of working.

Mike